Chapter 5
The walking was pretty easy, which was lucky for McKay, who had his eyes on his computer more than where he was putting his feet, Ronon noticed. The floor was pretty level, though strewn with loose stone, shallow pools of water here and there and, where the walls had fallen, or maybe where the way had always led outside through gardens, lichens and mosses had found a foothold. They'd passed rooms big and small, ruined and intact, a hall with a series of depressions, which McKay thought must've been a bathhouse, an area of cubicles that looked like shops. Then they'd walked above a half bowl-shaped area, with a flat piece at the bottom and all agreed it must've been an amphitheatre; there'd been one in Sateda, and Ronon had been to a concert there once. He remembered the summer evening, the music, Melena; but this was no time to be distracted. He tightened his grip on his weapon, turned and scanned the corridor behind them, where he could see all the way back to the big entrance hall, a shaft of bright light now spearing through the hole in the dome.
Sheppard spoke. "How're we looking, McKay?"
"Getting warmer. We should keep going this way."
They carried on, passing a room that jutted out over the slope, its walls intact, an archway at the far end framing a view of the mountain range. The cloud had gone, the sky blue once more. A warm breeze blew through the arch, but it was cool within the ruins; cool, silent and broken, and Ronon thought again of Sateda, shattered Sateda, that had once been his home.
"Flashlights on, folks!" announced John.
oOo
Teyla flicked on the light on her P90. They had reached the area where the hallway tunnelled into the bedrock of the mountain. Looking ahead into the darkness, there seemed to be faint patches of light at sparse intervals, where rooms had windows onto the mountainside, or perhaps where shafts had been cut to allow light and air to circulate. As they walked into the gloom, Teyla played her light over the walls, seeing decorative patterns and even the images of figures and landscapes as they penetrated further into the protected interior of the mountain. She was about to comment on the beauty of the vibrant colours, when her eye was caught for another reason.
"John! Look!" A series of deep parallel lines had been gouged into the surface of the wall.
"Claw marks?" said John.
"Grenza," Ronon agreed.
"Are they recent?"
Teyla touched the marks and then trained her light on the floor, studying the debris.
"I would say not. But it is difficult to tell."
They stood in silence for a moment, as if listening for the rasp of claw on stone, but all that could be heard was the steady, distant drip of water and the hollow moan of the wind in the ventilation shafts.
oOo
"Well, I suppose that answers my question," said Rodney, watching John as he scrubbed his hand through his hair and shook his head, as if he had water in his ears.
"What?"
"That's the fifth time you've done that in as many minutes!"
"So? Something's kinda itchy. Or buzzy. Can you hear anything?"
"No, but I've been detecting more diffuse energy traces around us, so I would say that's your ATA pricking up its ears, wouldn't you?"
"Oh. Huh. Yeah, I guess."
"So, as I was saying, that answers my question, to wit: does this place rely on pre-ATA technology? The answer being, no, or at least, not exclusively."
"Nothing's turning on," said Ronon, bluntly.
"No, because there's nothing here to turn on, is there? Have you seen any light fittings? Any sliding doors that might open with the wave of a hand? No, me neither!"
"So, why can I feel...?" John waved a hand in the air.
"Diffuse energy traces indicating the presence of active power conduits? Well, my guess is, that if we could find a way further into the mountain, behind this wall, here," Rodney slapped the wall to their right, "we'd encounter something that would respond to your magic touch, and mine too, hopefully."
"So, onward, then."
"Onward," Rodney agreed.
Rodney kept his eyes on the energy readings as he walked, watching the fluctuating figures on his glowing screen and registering, with a small part of his mind, the weaving and bobbing of the P90 lights ahead of him and the steady tread of four pairs of boots.
"McKay?"
"Yes? What?"
John, his face faintly lit by the blue light of Rodney's laptop, jerked his P90 toward the wall to their right. There was a doorway, and it had the familiar outline of the doors on Atlantis and a control panel to one side. John waved his hand over it. Nothing happened. Rodney pushed the laptop into John's hands and took the covering off the control panel. It was empty; no crystals.
"Now what?" John said.
"Now we use brute force," said Rodney.
"Oh, really?" said John, his expression one of suppressed eagerness.
"C4?" asked Ronon.
"No, not C4, strangely enough! Think about where we are, Conan!" said Rodney, pointing straight upward. "Millions of tonnes of rock? Ring any bells?"
Ronon growled.
"Let's start with the low-tech approach, shall we?" said John. "Ronon, see if you can jam a knife in there and we'll try and force it."
Rodney left them to it, taking his laptop back from John and sitting down, to assess the likelihood of there being a free flow of power in the rooms behind the door. He wondered if the door led to a private area for scientific study, or, more prosaically, but with possibilities, a maintenance area with a power plant. Rodney ignored the grunting, straining and cursing coming from John and Ronon, but he noticed that Teyla's hands had tightened on her P90 and she was peering back up the shadowy corridor.
"Did you see something?"
"I am not sure," said Teyla.
There was a loud thump and Ronon and John fell suddenly to either side of the doorway.
"Think we broke it?" panted Ronon.
"It's open, anyway," said John, climbing to his feet.
oOo
John raised his P90 and played the beam of light left and right, up and down, revealing glimpses of the smoothly-panelled walls of a corridor straight ahead, doors at intervals to either side, and to his left a stairway, leading down. He stepped forward, and a familiar little tickle in an indefinable corner of his mind heralded a dim yellow glow, emanating from rounded wall lights, which spread until the area before John was fully illuminated, the walls dark red, veined with gold, the floor black and smoothly reflective. There was no hint of ruin or decay, as if this section had been preserved as well as their own lost city.
"Looks like Atlantis," said Ronon.
"Feels like Atlantis," said John. "Kind of."
They moved further into the corridor. The air was cool, but not stale and John thought there must either be ventilation or another entrance.
"We should not leave this door open behind us," said Teyla.
John caught the worry in her voice. "Why? D'you see something?"
"I am not sure. Just a shadow, perhaps."
John shook his head. "There're too many shadows in this place. Can you close it, McKay?"
"Working in it!" Rodney had already taken the casing off the control panel. "Your delicate touch has broken the mechanism, but if you slide the doors together, I think I can lock them in place."
"And get them open again when we want to leave ?" asked Ronon.
"Yes, of course," replied Rodney, irritably.
The door locked behind them, John felt he could be slightly less on his guard, against grenza at least. They were definitely out there, or at least something was; the only doubt John had was when they would attack and with how much force.
"We should head down," said Rodney.
"We'll check out this level first, McKay," said John, and, seeing that Rodney was about to protest, he continued, "I know you want to chase your energy readings, but we don't want to miss anything." And I want to get a feel for this place, he added, to himself. "Ronon, you and Rodney take the rooms on the left, me and Teyla'll do the right."
The first room John and Teyla investigated was lined with low benches, hooks and tall cupboards; it looked like a changing room. Rodney and Ronon had discovered the same thing on their side.
"Male and female changing rooms?" asked Teyla.
"For work clothes. Uniforms," Ronon suggested.
"ESD protective gear," said Rodney, hopefully. "Electrostatic discharge!" he continued, seeing blank looks. "For working with delicate equipment!"
"Yeah, maybe," said John, noncommittally.
They moved on. Some of the rooms were empty, with no clues remaining to tell of their use. One was a bathroom, with showers, the plumbing not working, unfortunately. There were a couple of offices, desks and cabinets still in place, too bulky to be worth moving out.
"This is all admin and irrelevant practical stuff!" snapped Rodney. "Can we go down now?"
They had reached the end of the corridor and there was another stairway, so no need to retrace their steps. The floor below was completely different. As John stepped off the bottom stair, more glowing yellow orbs sprang to life, the light spreading like a wave until the whole floor was lit, revealing a large open space with columns supporting the ceiling. The walls were lined with open-fronted cubicles and, in the centre of the room stood a bank of control consoles and display screens suspended from the ceiling.
Rodney hurried forward eagerly and John let him go, merely gesturing Ronon and Teyla forward to check for other exits. John examined the nearest cubicle. It was the size of a generous shower stall, about four feet square and maybe ten high. There were ports of various sizes in the walls, rounded, as if tubes or cables could be plugged directly into them. John turned and surveyed the room, seeing that Rodney had brought the consoles to glowing life and was hooking up his laptop. Ronon had returned to the stairwell and was leaning, with energy-saving nonchalance, against a wall, his position allowing an easy view of the room and the stairs leading up, as well as the flight leading further down. Teyla was also looking curiously at the cubicles.
"Could these be stasis chambers, like those on Atlantis?" she asked.
"Could be," replied John.
He counted the cubicles; fifteen along three sides of the room and thirteen along the entrance side, so that was fifty-eight altogether.
"They each have a control panel," Teyla observed.
"Which nobody will touch!" Rodney's voice rang out. "Especially Colonel Twitchy-fingers!"
"What're we looking at here, McKay?" John asked, approaching the central consoles. Rodney stood in the middle, like a drummer with his kit around him, tapping here and flicking there, his eyes flitting between the Ancient screens and his laptop. He held up one hand in John's direction, a finger raised, and continued tapping with the other hand. John waited.
"Aha!" Rodney burst out triumphantly. He stood up straight. "Altamontaris!" he announced, beaming. "Montarea!"
"Nemifahmam!" John countered, feeling that such a response was merited. "No entiendo!"
This earned John an exasperated, "Chuh!" (His second of the day, he thought, proudly).
"Names!" said Rodney. "The planet is called Montarea, the city is Altamontaris! And, as it turns out, we were all correct; it's referred to as a place of both leisure and learning as well as spiritual enlightenment, the jewel of Alteran culture! Atlantis was built for functionality; a ship of war. This place is far more!"
"Atlantis is pretty cool," said John, defensively, and by 'pretty cool,' he meant to express the sudden, visceral possessiveness he felt at Rodney's words; his city was the best place ever, in any galaxy, at any time. He felt like hitting something, but merely tightened his grip; his hands on his P90, his teeth on his lower lip.
oOo
Rodney, noticing John's reaction, hastily qualified his words.
"Well, of course, Atlantis is, as you say, 'pretty cool'. It's our home and it can fly, for a start, not to mention the fact that it's not mostly in ruins. But this place..." Rodney tailed off with an enthusiastic grin and a gesture toward his laptop. "Look!" John and Teyla looked over Rodney's shoulder as he showed them the plan on the screen. "See, this is us, here. This whole, sealed-off area was devoted to experimental technology. There are multiple levels. And look, the part we're in doesn't meet up with that first staircase we saw; that section's completely isolated, which makes me wonder why. And below this room there are more levels of labs. Then, here," he indicated a long passage leading from the bottom level to a room right in the heart of a mountain. A vertical shaft was marked above it. "This must be the source of yesterday's tremors."
"ZPM?" John enquired.
"The same place, I think," said Rodney, pointing to the room below the vertical shaft.
"Is it a weapon?"
"Maybe. Other than very general info and plans, it seems each lab's systems are separate from the others in terms of what the Ancients were trying to achieve, which means I'll have to hack each system individually to find out what they were up to. I don't know why they couldn't be a bit more explicit," Rodney grumbled. "There are some labels." He stabbed at the laptop and then read, "Guardian Type One, that's this room. Guardian Type Two, that's the room we missed, down the stairs near the entrance. Levels below us... there's something about materials-testing, altered consciousness (that'll be ascension experiments),... um... I think that word translates as cloning."
"So, what about this one?" asked John, pointing to the area in the heart of the mountain.
"It says 'power', so that'll be the ZPM. And something about 'equilibrium'."
"As in, restoring equilibrium to the galaxy by destroying the Wraith with a massive weapon?" John asked, hopefully.
"In all of our dreams," said Rodney, shrugging.
"This room is Guardian Type One?" asked Teyla. "What does that mean?"
"Oh, that's easy," said Rodney. "This is where they developed the grenza!"
oOo
Ronon had settled into that calm state of alertness that he had learned to maintain for hours on end many years ago, when carrying out sentry duty, the rank of Specialist only a distant dream. He was aware of the movement and voices of his friends peripherally, but his senses were much more intently tuned to pick up any sound not of their making, any stray scent or shift of air that might strike the jarring note of potential threat. Nothing had occurred, the air cool and with a very faint updraft, the silence, apart from sounds made by his team, complete. Ronon caught the word 'grenza', pushed himself away from the wall and paid attention.
"Those creatures were created here?" Teyla's voice expressed her distaste.
"Right here, in these cubicles," McKay confirmed. "It's all detailed in the database; the plans, the intentions, the abject failure and criminally careless release. Read it and weep!"
Ronon gritted his teeth and remembered the hunt he had taken part in the previous winter; the steadfast bravery of the farming community, the savagery with which some of the farmers had been killed. He thought about the continuing threat to the friends he had made, the monster he had slain and the two that had stalked him, that would have ripped him apart between them, if rescue hadn't come. Then he thought of all the cultures that had worshipped the Ancients, down through the ages, that worshipped them still, that counted them as gods. And it seemed to Ronon that the Ancients had seen themselves as gods, creating and destroying on a whim, acting as they saw fit, as if theirs was truly the divine right. He would blast their works out of existence.
"Chewie?"
Ronon found himself facing a row of the cubicles, his energy weapon raised. Sheppard gently, but firmly pressed down on his arm, until the weapon was aimed at the floor.
"I know how you feel, big guy, but that's not gonna help."
"I'd feel better."
"Yeah, maybe you would," agreed John. "But let's just leave them be, okay? Shooting up the place could start a fire, set off an alarm, make the whole place fall down round out ears, who knows? So, let's not risk it, okay?"
Ronon grunted a reluctant assent.
"What about this 'Guardian Type Two'?" Sheppard asked, turning back to McKay. It crossed Ronon's mind that he could fire, now that he was unobserved, but he resisted the impulse.
"Like I said, it's down the stairway we didn't investigate. There are no details here," Rodney said.
Another type of grenza? Ronon thought. Could it be lurking here, in the ruins? There had been something moving around last night; even McKay's instincts had picked that up.
"We'll check it out," said John, frowning. "There's something out there," he continued, echoing Ronon's thoughts. "And we need to know what we're up against." He looked at his watch. "We'll break first, though," he said, decisively. "Drink, eat, regroup. Then we find out if there's another crazy homicidal monster we need to worry about."